Between Shadows and Light 3: Share Your Air
by scribblemyname
Summary: Clint had been hesitant with their relationship, backing up emotionally and throwing up the walls any time it seemed to be getting serious, but as she lay tucked under his arm, she thought she'd like it if they got serious.
1. The Sound of Rain

_Inspired by regular requests from the Be Compromised community for Natasha falls first and also by the song "Share Your Air" by Kate Miller-Heidke (feat. Passenger)._

* * *

She was sleepy and warm, a firm arm draped over her waist under the covers. Perhaps too warm.

"I swear, Clint Barton, you're a furnace," Natasha muttered gently.

He didn't even stir, cocooned by the safety of his partner's watchfulness and the silence of his hearing aids on the bedside table. He wore his active duty set to bed whenever she wasn't with him. But she was with him, awake and listening to the patter of rain on the window of his apartment, the flutter of wings as a pigeon adjusted itself in a nest under the eaves, and the faint panting breath of Lucky asleep in the corner of the bedroom.

Clint had been hesitant with their relationship, backing up emotionally and throwing up the walls any time it seemed to be getting serious, but as she lay tucked under his arm, she thought she'd like it if they got serious.

Natasha stirred and worked out from under him, ignoring the faint whine of discontent, pausing only when the rhythm of his breathing broke and she thought he might wake. He didn't. She slid out of the bed and pulled on his shirt before heading into the kitchen.

* * *

Clint woke in the dark before sun-up and blinked in the darkness until his eyes adjusted. The covers were still warm but empty, and he half-swallowed her name before realizing she couldn't have gone far.

He rolled over for his hearing aids and listened. Hazy white noise fell like static, then resolved into the familiar patter of rain and softly clanking pots in the kitchen. He followed the noise out of bed, searched for his shirt, couldn't find it, and had to dig out a new one from the drawer. Natasha was always griping at him to hang them up, but he didn't really care all that much about wrinkles.

"Tasha," he called softly as he came out.

She was there, red hair haloed in the yellow microwave light as she hummed some soft melody to herself over breakfast. She was wearing his shirt.

He blinked and watched her for a long moment. She had to have heard him, but she didn't turn around until she finished scraping a third pancake off the griddle and setting it atop her plate.

"You're staring," she told him as she dropped the griddle into the sink and turned on the water. It sizzled and hissed on contact.

"You're worth staring at."

She looked up surprised at that, and Clint took the opportunity to slide his arms around her while her guard was down and tuck his chin against her shoulder.

"Missed you this morning."

"I didn't mean to wake you," she said ruefully. She didn't shrug him off though, so he held on as she washed the dishes and stacked them neatly beside the sink to dry. She turned around in his arms and kissed him, then lay her head on his shoulder. "I missed you too."

There was something hiding under her words and tone, but Clint didn't tease it out, too grateful for the peace of Natasha warm in his arms, the smell of pancakes filling the kitchen, and the sound of gentle rain.


	2. Nothing Feels at All the Same

Their little pocket of peace wouldn't last long, and both of them knew it. People like them never could hold onto the quiet moments for forever, but Clint also knew they wouldn't want to. The morning let him forget it though as he listened the gentle creak of wood floor under Natasha's bare feet as she drifted through his apartment between window and couch with a cup of tea and a soft, private sort of smile.

"Your apartment is loud," she murmured low when she was certain he was looking at her face.

Clint could barely read the words against white light streaming in through the window, but the complaint was familiar and comfortable between them. He liked the comfort of sleeping without hearing aids but preferred the safety of a heads-up when a stranger walked through. He shrugged and leaned back against the couch to watch her lean into the light, his shirt bulky over her silhouette. Natasha knew where every creak and sigh lived in his floors and walls. She could be silent if she wished, and she was comfortable enough here, safe enough in her own skin, to let the sounds of her passage fill the spaces between light and shadow.

They didn't speak for a little while, just stayed near each other as the light shifted and the rain gently eased then ceased. Eventually, Natasha sighed and her shoulders drooped slightly.

It sent a faint shiver of tension through the air. Clint rocked forward but stopped himself from going to her. "What are you going to do?" he asked at last.

She looked at him, a frown creasing between her brows. "I don't know." She hesitated, and that bothered him more because Natasha didn't hesitate. Not really. "Nothing's the same," she said, voice quiet and small.

Breath came a little harder, shorter. His grip tightened on the back of the couch. "Nothing?" His tone held steady though.

Natasha stared at him, then leaned her head back against the pane. "I'm not."

Small consolations. He nodded to himself and went back into the kitchen for another cup of coffee.

* * *

Restlessness filled the space where peace had been. Natasha knew that people like her and Clint weren't made for peace and quiet moments, but she had hoped their reprieve from the world would last a little longer before their new lack of employment came up. It had changed Natasha to remove SHIELD from the equation, so she had assumed it would change Clint too.

Displeased with herself, stumbling in her most important relationship like it was somehow something new, she pushed off the glass and followed Clint into the kitchen. She watched the hint of tension in his shoulders as he poured himself another mugful of the disgusting black brew that smelled so much better than it tasted.

She stalked forward, uncertain of her ground but certain of this, and refilled her own teacup with some of his coffee.

His face was neutral and reserved, though she doubted he was unsurprised.

She sipped it and grimaced. She looked at him and kept drinking, not able to put into words this feeling itching under her skin. She was here because she wanted to be, because she wanted him whether they were the same or not.

There were a lot of things she wanted.

"So." He drew out the word while staring into his coffee cup as he swirled it gently for a moment. "We're still partners." His eyes came up. The fidgeting stopped. He was still and silent, studying her with the intensity of a sniper, and she could feel her hackles rise at the sensation of being in a scope.

She knew the feeling and made herself not react as she smiled briefly and agreed. "Partners."


	3. My Love Could Not Hold You

Clint collapsed bonelessly across the couch and lay his head in her lap. She stilled, book still open in her hand, then stroked the fingers of her free hand through his hair. She used to think he was like a cat that way, but she didn't think it now because if her cat were to die, no matter how she loved it, she would kill its murderer with ice in her veins and move on, but if Clint were to die...

Her heart would stutter and stop and fail and she'd hold on as though she could bring him back and she'd shatter in a thousand pieces. She didn't know if he realized how desperately she wanted to hold him fiercely and tell him she loved him, but she didn't say it because she couldn't bear it if he still didn't feel the same way.

Instead, she set her book aside and ran her hand through his hair and held him with the other. She felt his breath on her fingers as he kissed them.

"What are we going to do?" Clint asked, breaking the silence suddenly. "Nice as this is, I'm not really ready to settle down yet."

Natasha smiled to herself. "Maria's gone to Stark."

She wasn't entirely sure that Clint was ready for the Avengers, and she could feel his ambivalence through her body. She wasn't sure he was ready for her either. With a sigh, she pushed off the couch. She could feel his gaze heavy on her back as she moved around, straightening things up. But he didn't say anything. He never said anything, just disappeared any time something hinted they were getting in deeper than we're partners and we watch each other's back and...

"I love you."

She said it. She turned around and looked at him, refusing to back down from the words and skipping straight past the hints and the 'Clint' and every step between _we're partners_ and _I love you_.

He stared at her with that intensity that had always made her want to flinch from it because he knew her in a way that no one ever had. She stared back and waited him out. Better to die on the battlefield than never look it in the face.

After several endless minutes, he broke their lock and leaned back his head on the couch. She watched him breathe in and out, in and out, in a steady rhythm. It used to reassure her when she'd watch him sleep.

"Clint." Clint was always the patient one, and Natasha couldn't take the silence much longer.

"What do you want me to say?" he answered quietly, looking at her again with that piercing gaze, unreadable and as distant from her as he'd ever been.

Natasha's frown tightened. She shouldn't have hoped, shouldn't have said it, but how long did he expect her to wait? "You know what I want." She left him and went into the bedroom to gather her things.


	4. Where I Held You

She fell in love with him gradually, as though the water had been cool when she stepped in and slowly risen to a boil.

 _Clint moves easily across the creaky apartment floor and Natasha props her chin on her hand as she watches him through hooded eyes from the kitchen table. He doesn't hear the sizzle and pop of the eggs in the skillet as he scrambles them with bell peppers and spices. He doesn't hear the rattle of the fire escape against the side of his building._

 _It floors her that he is comfortable in a world unsafe and silent. It rattles the cages of her own comfort that he is less dangerous than she and moves without fear._

 _Natasha asked him if he spoke sign language and he sighed in exasperation. "I'm deaf, lower case." At her look of incomprehension, "Not cultural. It's a thing, a physical factor I mitigate when I can." With hearing aids and military hand signals and an acute sense of his surroundings, but apparently not sign language and not even more lip reading than he acquired for espionage rather than communication._

 _He drops the plate in front of her with a grin and sets his own across from her._

 _"You got more than I did." She pouts._

 _It's an act, and he doesn't buy it. "More in the skillet. See if you like it first."_

 _He's always doing that, seeing if she actually likes something,_ wants _something. She assumes for years that's why he never made a move in their intimate relationship toward romance._

 _She was wrong._

* * *

 _"You like that?" he murmurs the question into her ear as if her body is not shuddering her answer. He pauses until she forces her words to answer him, demanding his touch, demanding more. Their first time together, it seems like there is nothing he is unwilling to give._

 _"Do you want this?" he asks, his own eyes uncertain._

 _She kisses him deeper, slides over him, and he hisses with pleasure not pain. He pulls her against him and does not ask again._

* * *

 _He treats her exactly the same in the morning, and she doesn't know what to make of it. She flounders when she pushes at him, flirts with him in a briefing, and his measuring gaze turns puzzled but he plays it off like it's an act._

 _She figures out that she's his partner, but she doesn't figure out at first that she's not really his lover. He won't say the words. He won't think them, won't feel them, won't_ mean _them. He'll laugh with her, flirt with her, spend time with her as partner and friend, even go on a date when she asks, sleep with her, but whenever she pushes, he withdraws. She doesn't want to lose him, so she stops pushing._

* * *

He fell in love with her hard, not at all when he saw the graceful killer she could be, then suddenly, desperately when months of watching her came together in a single moment when she bought a ticket to the ballet and pressed it into the hands of a little girl who'd wanted it.

He fell in love hard and fast, as if he'd been dropped in a seething cauldron of boiling water and just looking at her felt like it burned.

 _Clint is asked countless times after he brings her in, Why did you let her live? Why did you make another call?_

 _He doesn't answer._

 _He can't tell them that he recognizes her, the flinch from violence in every line of her body when she's startled, the restless sleep that lets her wake at the slightest change in her environment, the fire in her eyes when someone hurts a child, the way she stares at ordinary life with naked longing for something she's never had. He knows her in a way he shouldn't be able to from months spent tailing her through smog and dust and the thick aroma of Italian pastries. He knows her books that cause her fingers to linger, knows the way her body adheres to a ballerina's grace, knows the way her chin tips upward and she smiles appreciatively to certain strains of classical music, but never, never the Russian._

 _He falls hard and fast, like he always does, and Phil asks him, "Why did you save her?"_

 _He doesn't answer, You saved me._

 _Fury asks him, "Why did you let her live?"_

 _He doesn't answer, She never deserved to die._

 _Maria asks him, "Why did you disobey your orders?"_

 _He doesn't answer, How can I condemn her when I have the same blood on my hands?_

 _Natasha had no choices. Clint made choices. Natasha had no likes or dislikes and Clint shares his indiscriminately with friend and enemy alike. Natasha is still staring at the people around her in longing and Clint has already crossed from one side to the other._

 _He falls hard and fast when she tells him softly, "I don't want to kill you either." He falls harder and faster when she's touching his furniture gently and looking at him with lost, puzzled eyes and tells him, "Your apartment is loud." He falls because she is beautiful and stronger than he's ever had to be and does not understand that she is finally safe but he's been there and she's like him and she's the first person in the world that looked him in the eyes and_ understood.

* * *

 _He's lost everyone he's ever loved, so he hides this fledgling flame within him. He doesn't need her love, doesn't want it, because love never lasts and it always turns to hate, but he needs her and he knows how to do that. He has that with Coulson, has that with May and Hill and even Fury too, who personally dragged his sorry hide through SHIELD training and regulations more than once._

 _Fury is like Duquesne, but he doesn't love Clint and so they last when Clint betrays him by saving Natasha. May and Clint terrorize recruits together and talk in the mess and work so well, but it's not love so it lasts and they move past the ways they hurt each other and disagree and leave each other for dead when the mission calls for it. Most people think Maria Hill hates Clint, but they bonded ages ago over good coffee and an equal dislike for laziness and incompetence on the field, and all their jabs and jibes and very real, very heated disagreements don't change that at the end of the day, they're fighting on the same side and Maria has the best Nespresso on the premises._

 _"Don't get used to it," she warns him every time she grudgingly shares._

 _He gets used to it._

 _Coulson is always professional, always there, always like the missing limb when another handler fills in, worse when they take him away after New York and give him his own team. He is meant to be with the Avengers,_ with _them. Clint can handle it though because it's not love and phone calls and visits make up the difference._

 _But Natasha…_

 _He'd be lost without her, like someone had ripped open his soul. He can't imagine his life without her in it, can't imagine anything but pain filling the place she snuggles into his side, not when he's the only one she allows to touch her. He's been here before, he always falls fast and hard, and he can't handle the agony of losing Natasha like he lost Barney, like he lost Bobbi. He couldn't stand to see her coldly say goodbye, leave him for dead, leave divorce papers on the table, stare at him with sadness in her eyes and pity instead of love._

 _So he ignores the love and he takes what works because this, their partnership,_ works _, and love never does._

 _Then she kisses him, slides her body against his and he takes it because he's a fool and an idiot and he can't help but falling…_

* * *

 _He thinks it's over the morning after. He's been a fool and thrown himself back into the fire (and she's always felt like burning), and he's out of the bed before she's awake, scrambling into a shower and clothes and leaving a note about his early morning briefing with Coulson._

 _It's not over though._

 _She watches him for a morning, a day, puzzled but not angry. She settles on his lap at the end of a day and says, "This doesn't have to mean anything."_

 _He has never felt more relieved._

* * *

He put his hand on hers, stopping her with a privilege only he had. "Don't, Nat." His eyes were wide and pleading. "Please don't go."


	5. My Soul Be Satisfied

_Please don't go._

 _Partners._

Natasha stared at Clint's hand on hers. She had managed for years to be his partner when she wanted more, managed to direct her need for romance into helping others find it, and managed to love a man who didn't love her back. But right now, she didn't know if she still could.

She sat down on the bed and threaded her fingers through Clint's. He was tense, and she finally made herself look in his face and read whatever waited for her beneath the intensity of his gaze.

It knocked her for a loop, the desperation and need in his eyes. "Nat," he said, softly, roughly. "Please."

"I love you," she whispered again, the admission coming out despite herself. He wasn't the only one who needed something here, some reassurance they weren't alone.

His hand clenched; he reflexively almost pulled her closer but stopped himself from pulling her up off the bed. "I can't— I always screw it up. I can't do that to you, Nat. I can't."

She stared at him, breath stuttering, heart rate increasing.

"They're all gone," he said softly, finally admitting out loud what was wrong with _them_ , why he'd never let them go any further than they had.

Natasha had seen Clint hurting, aching, lost, but rarely had she seen him so vulnerable. She tugged on their joined hands to pull him closer to her. "Who?"

His head dropped a bit, voice dropped further, almost lost under the white noise of the apartment. "Everyone but you."

She drew in a pained breath. She brought her other hand up to card her fingers through his hair. He sighed and leaned against her, palm resting gently against her hip. She captured his shoulder with her elbow, drew him down to her closer still until she could hold him fully.

 _Please don't go._

 _We're still partners._

For a long while, there weren't any words. There was the warmth of his body in her arms, his exhales mingling with hers, heads pressed together as they held on but didn't speak. They had been together through everything, through fire and pain, heartache and every single relationship the other had. His thumb brushed back and forth over her jaw. She tipped her head to the side and met his mouth with hers.

He stiffened, hesitated, then let her kiss him, kissed her back. He ran his free hand through her hair and pressed soft kisses along her neck.

"Clint." This didn't fix anything. They'd done this so many times.

He shuddered and drew back, eyes dark and serious. "Natasha."

She loved the way he said her name and always had. There was something in it that made her feel precious for the first time in her life for reasons that had nothing to do with death. It had always been Clint. He was the reason she came to SHIELD, the reason she left it. Without him—

"I won't leave," she promised.

He studied her face, and she could read the uncertainty in his.

She traced gently over his shoulders and up over his jaw. "I love you, and I won't leave."

"Bobbi said that." He said it without much emotion, almost as if he'd expected it.

Natasha shook her head. "She wasn't your partner. If this doesn't work out, you'll still be my partner. That's what you told me, remember?" She smiled softly. "With or without SHIELD."

She couldn't find belief in his eyes, warring with the caution, but hesitantly, he nodded and that was enough, wasn't it? Enough that he stayed, enough that she stayed—just _enough._


	6. My Favorite Dream

She lay beside him in the quiet apartment for the longest time, listening to the rain still dripping off the eaves. It was evening now, twilight fading into darkness, and Clint's breath was low and even beside her where they lay in his tousled covers.

They were both dressed for bed, warm and safe. They hadn't done more than curled together, ventured out more considerations for and against the Avengers and Maria and Stark, Maria being the one thing that might make them comfortable enough to actually go. They were still partners, they were still Delta, and as a team, they still had friends and coworkers and preferences.

There was something cautious lurking under the tentative truce, something still tense and uncertain when she wound her fingers through his in a gesture of intimacy that wasn't built on their partnership or benefits.

Natasha leaned down and kissed the top of Clint's head. He stirred but did not wake from his drowse. She smiled and sipped her tea.

She had been cautious and uncertain wandering through his apartment when he first brought her in, unwilling to disturb their fragile truce. It had not remained fragile. They had become so utterly inseparable that neither of them could stand to be apart for too long. This would not remain fragile either.

* * *

Clint woke late in the nighttime to the smell of stale peppermint, a sharp papercut on his face, and—he blinked through the unexpected pages of a fat novel—Natasha sound asleep, red hair splayed across the pillows and his arm. He carefully rose without jostling her and put the book on the side table beside her teacup. That, he took into the kitchen where he could wash it out.

He wasn't always this clean, and Natasha had spent more than her fair share of times griping at him for this or that trait and habit.

 _"You're a bachelor," she'd teased once. "And it shows."_

 _He had corrected her then, not out of a desire to share that particular failure in his life, but because she was his partner and he tended to be honest with her. "Divorced, actually."_

 _She closed her mouth and stopped teasing, changing the language to Czech and the topic to their upcoming assignment._

All the little things she did for him, the things he did for her. Clint stopped at the sink and stared upward for a long time, just letting it sink into him that he couldn't keep her with him and keep things the way they had always been.

He cursed once, softly, under his breath and turned off the water, put the cup in the dishwasher. He looked around the apartment and marked out what would go and what would stay or be put in a safehouse stashed somewhere else again. He figured the boxes he would need and the days it would take to pack it, just him and Natasha, because for now at least, she wasn't going anywhere without him.

* * *

Natasha never could sleep long with anyone moving about wakeful while she slept. She slid out of bed, realizing she'd lost Clint somewhere along the way, and went to the bedroom door to see what he was doing.

He was... packing?

She blinked, took a breath, and went out there. "Clint."

He glanced up, then continued putting books tightly into the box he was using and had emptied of more than enough junk she'd told him years ago to get rid of. "I think," he said firmly, "we should go to Stark's."

Natasha studied him for a long moment. She had suggested Maria, but now she wanted to chide him for making a final decision without her. She couldn't though. She knew Clint, knew that when he finally jumped in, he went in with nothing held back.

She padded back into the room and pulled on his hoodie. It was late, and the night was cool. She went back out and crouched beside him to help.


End file.
